Wireless peripheral devices are becoming ever more common. Indeed, in some instances the wireless peripheral device functions as a primary source of user inputs to the computing device, e.g., a wireless keyboard, wireless cursor control device, and so on. However, conventional techniques used to authenticate a user prevented manufacturers from providing the wireless peripheral device as the sole device that would be permitted to interact with the computing device to support this authentication.
Consequently, conventional authentication techniques required the manufacturer to provide a wired peripheral device (e.g., a wired keyboard) to authenticate the user, such as by supplying a user name and password. After authentication, the wired peripheral device was rarely used by the user, which was both inefficient to the user and expensive for the manufacturer to supply the device.